I would like to give my appreciation for the continued support of Ranger Traps. It seems like every other companion has new traps to use, or new archetypes to make use of them, and as someone who really likes the idea of using traps, this is awesome. It makes me look forward to each player companion to see what's available.

I think this would be a great opportunity for a Player Companion book as well: Trapper's Toolbox. It could contain all the ranger traps released so far, as well as references for what other books contain trap using archetypes.

The Ranged Tactics Toolbox had a good amount of advice on avoiding common issues related to ranged combat, and I think there is ample space to give the same sort of advice for trap using. For example, how do you deal with the need to prepare the battlefield before hand? Ideas on scouting, trap placement, ways to hide them further, how not to bog down every combat by spending 20 minutes alone time with the GM on scouting and trap placement, etc.

I'm also curious if we'll see any Ranger Skirmisher Tricks, as there are now three core classes/archetypes that make use of them, and they're in a similar vein to the traps!

These are my notes for a playtest of the five characters listed above.

Our party was built to be reasonably average, and not minmaxed. I was not aware of the details of each class when I came up with each encounter, so they were general encounters to test a wide variety.

We had:

Mox, the Dwarven Geokineticist
Maggie, the Dwarven Pyrokineticist
Viv, the Medium of Bear, Big Sky, and Cricket
Sylvia, the Mesmerist. Tower of Blood, the mirror image one, a few others that I'm forgetting.
Gabriel Silence, the Occultist of Abjuration, Transmutation, Divination, Conjuration, and Necromancation--y. He focused on skills and spells, as well as Minions.

The first encounter was one that was CR 13. A CR equal encounter. It took place in one of the 'stomachs' of a quarter mile wide undead abomination, and the stomach housed:

Pyrohydra

Rift Drake

Cyrohydra

Giant Lake Octopus that was hiding until the second turn, when it tried to pull the Occultist into the acid.

The map was 120+ feet long. About 15 feet on the party's side of walkable area, 20 feet on the opposite side. The rest was all open air, with a 20 foot drop before the acid "lake".

The party started out refreshed from fighting their way into the Abomination's body, due to GM Handwavium. The goal was to hit 4 encounters.

Prebuffs: Air Walk

Encounter:

The medium was in front with his 60' blindsense from focus points in his Divination focus, I believe, as they marched into the room. They could've used Greater Invisibility to go through, as none of the monsters had See Invisible. Some 40+ perception checks later, and they saw all the creatures.

Mox one init, and used Snaking Blast + Ride the Blast + the entangle blast + earth blast to attack the rift drake. He used a move action to reduce the burn to 0. He rolled a 31 against the rift drake's 20 AC. But the drake makes the DC 21 reflex save against Entangle. Mox is now right next to the rift drake, air walkin'.

Maggie used fireblast + extended range to burninate the Cyrohydra. Rolled a nat 12 on the touch AC, which alone beats the touch AC. Rolled 117 fire damage...which was multiplied by 1.5 for 175.5 damage. It was... very surprised, and very, very dead.

Sylvia the mesmerist was up net. She air walked over to the rift drake, stared at it, and then cast Oppressive Boredom. I have a new found disliking of that spell. The drake failed the DC on its next turn, thanks to the Stare.

Gabriel cast Phantom Steed, and hopped on.

The octopus moves into range, and Gabriel senses it. He then feels it as a tentacle thwaps him. It rolled 10, with a +16, for a total of 26. Missed Gabriel's AC of 30.

At this point, I realized I terribly misread the Hydra entries, because they had a poor reach, with slow move speed, and a breath weapon that was less than their reach. Realizing I sort of screwed up the encounter by putting the hydras at the far end of the chamber, the pyrohydra moved closer. Slowly.

Viv attacked the octopus, getting a total of +37 and +35 on her two attacks. She dealt 99 points of damage split over those two hits. Her 30' range helped tremendously, as it meant she could whack the octopus (technically, whacked the octopus' tentacles. They were waving around, as they do.)

Mox used Earth Blast + Kinetic Whip + Entangle against the rift drake. No AoO due to oppressive boredom. He got 34 to-hit, which easily hit the rift drake's AC. 51 points of damage. Rift drake got a total of 16 on the save against the entangle, so it was entangled. Mox rolled 39 damage on his iterative, and again the drake failed the save. It was now rooted in place.

Maggie was up. She rolled a 2, got a 23 against touch AC. She blasted the octopus for 60 points of damage.

Sylvia was up, and decided to feint the octopus. No one, even her, knew why she did this, but she did. Feinted with a 45. But first, she stared against it. Then she used Unadulterated Loathing, and selected Viv. Which made the octopus nauseated, since it only got 20 on its save.

Not really able to do anything, Gabriel cast Resist Fire on himself.

Rift Drake drools on itself.

The octopus tries to move down, but Viv's AoO against it kills it. Since it was a crit. And she did 100 damage on that crit.

The pyrohydra pounces against Viv, and this provokes an AoO for her. She has Combat Reflexes (and 30' reach), so she hits for 43 damage. He bites her once out of 8 times, because he has a +10 bonus on bites, and I think she had 32 AC. His one hit was a nonconfirmed crit, for 8 damage.

Viv attacks, easily hitting twice. She does 49 damage, and 44 on the second attack. This kills the Pyrohydra quite well.

At this point, the drake was bored and rooted in place, so we just fast forwarded. They all got across the stomach just fine.

Thoughts: Most of these monsters were CR 9 or 10. I wanted an encounter that was CR equal with a good number of monsters, to avoid the action economy issues of on CR equal enemy. The party absolutely used less resources than the oft-toted "25% of party resources per encounter". I think this was partially due to how good at the game the players are, partially due to poor reading on my part with the hydra's placement far back, and partially because the classes just... didn't need to use resources. The only spell cast that was actually necessary was Phantom Steed. The party would've whomped the enemies just fine without Oppressive Boredom, Unadulterated Loathing, and Resist Fire. The damage of the kineticist was surprisingly high to me, and it had no problem hitting. That was most likely due to the AC of CR 9 creatures, but the +5 AC that the average CR 13 creature has wouldn't have caused much of a difference. He still would've hit most of them. I think it was mostly player skill, followed by the classes handily handling the foes, and then poor placement of the hydras. The occultist didn't really do much. This was partially the build, for sure, since it avoided prebuffs etc. But it was interesting to see what a more "scholarly" occultist would look like. He later felt that the minion focus didn't make up for not selfbuffing to bash faces in. A delicate act to balance the two, I imagine, but something we noted. He did make most of the Knowledge checks, I believe, and that was really helpful.

I'd like someone to take a look at my subscriptions, and see what's up with them. The payment was originally denied, but I've since resolved that issue.

My subscriptions page also says I'm queued up for Occult Mysteries and the Harrow Handbook (I should be getting two comp copies of this, and confirmation on that would be nice too!), which I don't need either of. If you could cancel those two, and reprocess the order, that'd be appreciated!

Wrote a program (not going to release it, sorry!) to parse the Monster DB, and get the CR and Melee / Ranged attacks each monster had.

From there, through trial and error I was able to parse the melee and ranged lines to figure out how many attacks each monster got, taking into consideration things like "or" (and in that case, taking whichever had more attacks), commas, iteratives, etc. The heuristics aren't perfect. In fact, to preserve sanity, I just hardcoded all the natural attacks in, and checked to see if the attack was one of those or not. So any non-standard natural attacks may not count right.

Regardless, there are 2843 monsters in the DB, and I'm now fairly confident that my numbers are about right. If they aren't, the number of wrong numbers probably won't influence the averages too much. These numbers are rounded to the nearest whole number. For example, CR 20 is actually 4.93, not 5. But that's a lot closer to 5 than it is 4, so it rounds up.

Any CRs less than 1 were rolled into 0, which isn't displayed here. Any CRs greater than 20 were rolled into 20, since the reason why I needed these only needed to go up to 20.

I'd like to request that the sections in Animal Archive that relates to tricks, Handle Animal, and the magic items that animals can use be posted on the PRD. This is an oft-requested explanation of core mechanics that shouldn't require purchasing of a Player Companion book just to fully understand.

Given the news that the Technology Guide will be posted to the PRD, I think it is now fair game to add other sections of books that help explain mechanics in the Core rules.

Are there any plans to errata through the Golarion FAQ the thundercaller archetype from Varisia, Birthplace of Legends? Sean seemed to think it could use a quick whack, but I'm curious if that'll ever turn into errata on the FAQ page, since I know those books don't get a second printing.

Thanks!

Spoiler:

I just made a post that's kinda asking Paizo Developers for attention. I feel...so...dirty...

I was perusing the bestiaries yesterday when a thought occurred to me: if a monster's schtick is to deceive humanoids by looking like a humanoid, it's almost always going to be a beautiful human female. Sometimes they have Elven features as well, but in general it seems to be a human female.

And I got to thinking. What does that mean? Surely monsters that evolved similar tactics on other planets would reflect the indigenous races there. So why are the vast majority of these types of creatures on Golarion masquerading as a beautiful human female?

Is it just because humans are so populous? Because the standard of beauty (or lust, as many of these monster's ply) holds humans to be the epitome?

While I don't wish to dwell on the circumstances around this, suffice to say, I wish to show some gratitude for the solid products LPJr Design puts out. To that end, let's get a little Mikazemas going, eh? It's still cold out, and that's what really matters about Mikazemas, right?

I will gift the following items to the first person to request them, one per person. Please leave a request in this thread with which book you want.

with at least one hand free, you can designate one melee
attack being made against you before the roll is made.
You receive a +4 dodge bonus to AC against that attack.
If you using the total defense action instead, you can
def lect one melee attack that would normally hit you.
An attack so def lected deals no damage and has no other
effect (instead treat it as a miss). You do not expend an
action when using this feat, but you must be aware of the
attack and not f lat-footed.

I'm currently in the middle of a project to get a good feel for the math behind Pathfinder, using what I believe to be baseline examples of CRB classes and Table 1-1 of the Bestiary. This is primarily for my own benefit for when designing, but other people seem to enjoy the information, so I'm posting it in various threads.

To expand past the fighter, I'm curious if there's any data collating and averaging the encounters of the Paizo APs and modules, and if so, if I can have access to it.

What I'm mostly curious about is the percentage of type/subtype and alignment pairs used in encounters, and maybe if there are classed levels or not. This would all tie to a certain CR, and from this we can get a very rough idea of the usage of certain types of creatures.

If there's not already one of these DBs, I'm aware of how silly it would be to ask you guys to suddenly make one, so I'll leave that to Karui Kage :)

The basics are that he's too busy selecting other feats, so he gets his feats later. He's not as aggressive on getting the good magic items, so those get pushed back as well. He puts a few of his HD based points (specifically, 8 and 16) into a non-Str. He still starts out with 15 Str though.

He uses a sword and board, but doesn't want to go for the offensive-shield-use feats, since that's a bit complicated and honestly, doesn't really fit his character.

This guy gets up there, gets some solid hits in, and has a nice AC (abstracted away), allowing his rogue buddy to get in there and tear up the foe with sneak attacks. Then he puts one foot on the head of his vanquished foe, strikes a heroic pose, and then goes to the tavern for some good old fashion ale and wenches.

Due to the nature of the character, I've modified the program to run it both with Power Attack always on and with it never on. I'll post both results.

This version HAS the boots of speed, which I think is sort of pushing it. But it'll be interesting. Next post will have the data without the boots of speed.

Again, I'm not posting these to prove a point (lookin' at you, "Math break down?!" thread :P), but to get data out there for what I believe to be reasonable "most optimized" and "average" fighters in the CRB only.

Recently I was interested in seeing what the DPR is of a baseline CRB only fighter. I wrote a program up to calculate everything for me, and I figured I'd share the results with others, in case they are interested.

Here's the basic build. I didn't fully stat out at every level, and I figure the left over money and feats will go to shoring up defenses or other areas. Elite Array, human fighter only, falchion, abstracted away everything but bonuses to-hit and damage, as they should have enough Whatever to fill in the rest.

But first a few things:
Why CRB only? I wrote this for my own use when designing class options. If a 15 PB character with my options is outdamaging the core fighter, there are problems. Since I believe everything should be balanced around Core so it doesn't cause a powerclimb, I chose CRB only. Yes, that means no Gloves of Dueling. This also provides a benchmark for powerclimb in later books.

Why Elite array? Because I wanted a standard baseline. It was either this or 15 point buy, and in the interest of reducing variability, I just went with the Elite array, putting the 15 into Str. Plus, PF is technically designed around 15 PB, 4d6 drop lowest, or elite array, and elite array seemed like the best choice for this.

Why falchion? Falchion Fred is, from what I recall, the most optimized CRB fighter, so I went with his weapon choice.

Is this using power attack? Yes. All power attack, all the time. Why? Because I'm lazy, and fighters aren't too badly off always using it.

When did he get everything? I roughly guessed when he got all the items, and didn't do a thorough check against WBL. The trends would stay the same, even if the exact numbers change.

Check out the jump from 19 to 20! Most of that is actually from the auto-confirmation of crits, not the x3 multiplier. I had included the x3, but only caught that I missed the auto-confirm later. Once I added that in, DPR jumped!

Level 11 is when the most optimized (or close to most optimized) CRB fighter can kill a creature 2 CRs above his level in 2 rounds. I find this to be a pretty interesting benchmark! But it's mostly due to the boots of speed kicking in. Such is the power of those boots!

If you have any questions, let me know. I can finagle the numbers easily enough.

But again, this was for my own knowledge when designing, and isn't meant to make much else of a point :)

I went for the Envoy alternative racial trait, and using that, I picked up Arcane Strike. This was in response to the reports of investigator's not having all that great combat at low levels. I used Arcane Strike on all of my attacks, and while the ability to overcome DR didn't come up, I'm sure I would've been very grateful if it had.

The first encounter was with a pair of spider swarms, but we dropped them really fast with a burning hands and an alchemical fire.

Our second encounter was with the Minotaur. The rest of my party elected to fight it, drawing its attention from Janira. We made use of the difficult terrain, and while we blew most of our resources (arcanist used grease twice, I used 2 points for Inspiration on a key attack roll), we did eventually take it down. We lost the Hunter's badger animal companion in the process though. RIP Badgah.

The hunter was fairly optimized from what I could tell. He made use of Tribal Scars to start out with 16 HP, so he was sort of our tank. I don't know which option he used for that feat. He also had Rime Spell and Magical Lineage (snowball), allowing him to augment that wonderful spell snowball so it could cause a foe to be staggered and entangled for a round. He used it on the minotaur and hit, but the mino saved against the staggered. He was still entangled for a round tho, which really helped the characters in melee to pull out.

My character ran for the backpack after throwing a sling at the minotaur, and picked up a tanglefoot bag from it. After that, he spent hte next round moving closer to the minotaur, and finally throwing it. I rolled a 3 on the attack roll, but had said I was spending Inspiration on it, so I got a total of 9. Had I read the class more carefully, I would've known that you choose to add inspiration only AFTER the roll. I wouldn't have added it in this case had I known that. HOWEVER! 9 hit him, keeping him entangled, and more or less forcing him to attack the badger, rather than us.

Poor badger died at this point.

With regard to this fight, I felt that I was able to contribute, but this was in many ways due to not having anything else to contribute with, making it so checking out that backpack was my best option. Kind of counter intuitive.

After dropping the Minotaur, we built a cairn for Badgah and said our prayers. We then went spelunking. Inspiration didn't help much with the first few parts of the cave, but I was able to use Linguistics and the free inspiration to learn about the pictographs on the wall. It was fun to be able to get that extra 1d6, despite how simple it is.

After crossing the pit, I was able to decipher parts of the old Azlant paintings depicting sections of Aroden's holy book, again using Inspiration. This was fun too. Yay!

We met the Gillman, and after waffling on what to do, we went to greet him. I walked up to him, and said "Hello, friend" in Abolethese (which I had because I wanted to take advantage of the free Linguistics Inspiration, so I needed the rank). Turns out he couldn't hear me, but we were able to handle this event peacefully. I believe I spent my last point of Inspiration here too, on a Perception check to notice his cloak. We ended up trading the cloak we got with his wand of shield of faith, which proved key for later on, when the AC bonus saved our warpriest from a nasty hit by a critter.

Following this, we went to one of the caves, and faced off against some skeletons. At this point, our arcanist was left with just using a whip to try and trip enemies. Kind of clever, come to think of it. He didn't have any offensive cantrips, so that's about all he could do.

I mostly used my sling against the skeletons we faced, and got unlucky and then very lucky with rolls. Nothing specific to report about the investigator here, other than that taking Arcane Strike to make up for the lack of offensive capabilities proved helpful.

We then found the second passageway out. Fast forward to the next cave path...I used my extract of blend to be able to scout ahead. This was very, very helpful, and let me see which creatures we were going to face before facing them. There was a communication breakdown with the GM, and he thought we were closer to them than we all thought, so it ended up being that the mites heard us discussing our plan of attack. Ah well, element of surprise lost.

During the battle, I didn't much use investigator abilities, but did use Comprehend Languages from the Envoy racial trait to understand what the mites were saying. Again, I got that trait primarily for Arcane Strike, but those 4 spells it grants (comprehend languages, detect magic, read magic, and detect poison) fit the Investigator very well, and I wanted to be able to cast them despite not having cantrips. I could just use my own extracts for comprehend languages.

As other comments:

There was some question on who should have the wand of Cure Light Wounds, but after learning that the investigator was not meant to be able to use wands, that was resolved pretty quickly.

I took a look at the 2nd level stuff an investigator gets, and wasn't too interested. It's a very boring level, especially due to how expensive poison is.

To just be able to use my class features, I needed to spend 55 gp on thieves tools (trapfinding) and alchemist's crafting kit (extracts). This leaves 50 gp on average left for the investigator to spend on anything else. Armor, weapons, food, backpack, bed roll, etc. Thankfully, this was for PFS, so I had 150 gp to spend total. But still, having to use either 1/2 or 1/3rd of starting gold just for the bare minimum tools to use your class features is really painful.

The alchemist's crafting kit gives the supplies for bombs, mutagens, and extracts. The investigator only needs a third of those, so an item that just has the material for extracts would be helpful, especially if it were much cheaper.

GM was a bit frustrated with Inspiration. It messes up secret rolls as he doesn't know if I would've spent inspiration or not. It also doesn't let him just ask for random perception checks, a very common thing to do that I think is even recommended in the GMG, as if I spend a point of inspiration on it, it's literally a wasted point. In a home game, he could give it back, but in PFS, I don't think that's an option. He didn't ask for random rolls this game, due to that.

Overall (Investigator):

Was it fun to play an investigator? Yes, I enjoyed myself.

Was it fun to create an investigator? Not particularly. I spent a lot of time trying to figure out the gold stuff due to the cost of the tools to use extracts and trapfinding. I also spent a lot of time looking for ways to be useful in combat, settling on Arcane Strike. It seemed most of my stuff went to shoring up weaknesses, rather than making someone who was fun and awesome.

Was he useful in combat? Yep, thanks to Arcane Strike and his sling.

Was he useful out of combat? Yes! Inspiration was a great help.

Thoughts on other party members:
Warpriest: He seemed to work pretty well. I believe he had War and Sun as his blessings? He used War to buff himself and the hunter up a few times, and that was helpful.
Arcanist: He dumped Charisma and Str, and chose Potent Spells for that +2. The minotaur made his save against a greased-up-weapon, but failed it against the grease on the ground. Ended up whipping things in combats after the minotaur.
Hunter: Lost the animal companion really fast, so I don't think I can really comment on how his class worked.

I just upgraded to Android 4.3, and now the forums aren't quite working. With the recent change to loading the forums with the spinny thing, the spinning wheel won't stop spinning, and the message boards won't load. I can go to individual posts if they are in the Recent Messages RSS box, or if I click on a specific thread.

Yes, I tried turning it on and off again. Twice.

Screenshots available at request, but something isn't finishing its loop. Just like corgiloop

Uhh, don't actually have his stats. He had Power Attack, Weapon Focus, and a greataxe. Also used Raging Song (Superstitious) and cast Ear Piercing Scream and Soundburst.

The encounter setup:

Daring Brave (gnome) is up top of a mountain’s overhang, with his bow.

Battle Mage (elf) is behind a tree

Traitorous Brigand (horc) is half behind another rock

Half the squares were foliage / trees of some sort, as they were in a forest. A number of large rocks.

Here are my as-they-happened notes:

Quote:

Slayer snuck up and sneak attacked from range the brigand

brigand walked up (due to difficult terrain, couldn’t charge) to slayer and attacked. rolled 13, total of 20. missed the slayer’s 22 AC.
skald moved up and raged. has superstitious. Slayer turns down the rage
slayer moved into other foliage and stealthed, then sneak attacked. did 12 damage. Same as what he did before
investigator rolled a 9, +6 for 15 against AC 16 wizard
scorching ray, did 7 damage against the investigator. Argh!
Brigand 5’ stepped back, swung at the Bardbarian. Rolled a 2, missed.
Bardbarian did Ear piercing scream. Brigand did took 4 damage, and rolled 2 on the save. Dazed for one round
Slayer stealthed up to near the mage, shot. Critically hit and confirmed, but hit one of the mirror images.
mage 5’ stepped above the investigator, but stayed within reach, and used shocking grasp. missed with that.
gnome jumped down, trying to land on the slayer. didn’t land on him, but got an attack in. rolled 16 and hit him for 3 points of damage.
the bardbarian attacked the brigand, hit. Did 9 damage. Brigand is at negative, but has orc ferocity, so he’ll get one more attack in.
Slayer provokes an AoO, gets critically hit for 7 damage. Moves across the field, then stealths.
mage touches the investigator, for 5 shocking damage
brigand swings, hits with power attack. Deals 7 damage to the bardbarian. Goes unconscious after this due to orc ferocity.
The skald dropped sound burst. 3 damage, killing the brigand and stunning both the others.
Investigator drops swordcane, and picks up a stick. He has catch off guard. Hits the gnome with the stick. Does 10 damage.
Bardbarian attacked the mage, did 18 damage. One off from the total HP.
The slayer shot the mage, killing her.
Somehow, the investigator was the tank.

The enemies were plagued with a lot. of. bad. rolls. I think that throws a lot of the data from this playtest into the "questionable use" bin, but we'll see.

I'm having the players answer 9 questions related to their experience.

From what I saw, given the right tools, the slayer was pretty deadly. They were getting sneak attacks off round after round due to all the spare foliage they could hide in. And after the first few rounds, enemies were in the open, so they weren't protected by the foliage's concealment. He used favored target twice. Once against the Brigand, once against both the mage and the daring bravo. Given his playstyle, the move action cost didn't hurt at all.

The bardbarian messed up, and cast spells while raging. He thought it wasn't clear, as he recalled seeing clarification that bards could cast spells while using performance. He thought that rage song was a bardic performance, so that he could cast during it. Wouldn't have affected the outcome, I think, as once he started casting spells, he didn't really move. He was alright, overall. The Slayer turned down the rage, since then he wouldn't be able to stealth. The investigator was never in range to use it. The skald tried to give out superstitious. He chose half-orc solely so he could use the greataxe.

The investigator drew the short end of the stick. He ended up being the tank, at no fault of his own. Enemies just rolled poorly against him, and I don't think he ever used any class abilities other than tracking to figure out the right away the enemies went (for a better approach). And he used sneak attack once, after the bardbarian stunned the bravo and the mage. He also missed quite a bit, but that was partially due to the caster using Mirror Image. Ok, not just partially. Mostly due to that. At one point, he threw down his +1 swordcane in frustration and used a stick. He said he was more built for roleplaying, so it was sort of what he expected.

I'll post their responses to these 9 questions once I get them.

Quote:

• 1:What was the most fun aspect of your character's class? (This is to gauge what works, it's important to let the design team to know this).

• 2:What was the least fun aspect? (This is just to gauge what the player didn't enjoy about the class. They don't need to have an answer to this if they enjoyed it all. This is important data.)
• 3:What bit of rules did you have most trouble with, for example what did you find confusing, or not useful about your abilities, what abilities didn't you use at all this session? (This question is to gauge what language might be unclear, and whether some abilties need to be cut or changed)
• 4:Would you still play [component of class] knowing this class exists as an alternative? (This question is to gauge whether the hybrid robs too much of the parent classes uniqueness.)
• 5:Do any of the classes seem exceptionally powerful or weak in combat, especially compared to its related classes?
• 6:Do any of them seem especially fragile?
• 7:Are they particularly good or bad at performing tasks expected of them, both as adventurers and for their role in the party (skills, NPC interaction, investigation, and so on).
• 8:Any mechanics that are cumbersome in play?
• 9:Any rules that were confusing or you had to make a ruling on?

In an attempt to lower the noise to signal ratio, I’ve created this thread to hopefully contain the majority of the discussion on the effects of the introduction of the brawler class on the monk.

So, what are your thoughts on the Brawler versus the Monk? Does the brawler obsolete the monk? Will the people who enjoy the smack-yo-face aspects of the monk migrate to the brawler, leaving the fans of the monk’s mysticism behind?

This topic comes up fairly often, so I figured I'd spread the word on this new tidbit that I hadn't seen elsewhere. Since this isn't about Dreamscarred Press' material primarily, I didn't post it in the Compatible Products forum.

Question wrote:

Psionics has been well covered by third-party publishers like Dreamscarred Press. Is that a subject that you can see Paizo tackling at some point?

Jason Bulmahn wrote:

Personally, I like what Dreamscarred has done with psionics, and I wouldn’t want to come in and do the exact same thing. I think if Paizo ever decides to look into psionics, we’ll go in a different direction. It’s not currently in our plans, but I wouldn’t rule it out in the future.

Often times, people wonder if they'd just use DSP's work, and this lends more support to the idea, often espoused by Mr. James Jacobs, that Paizo would go its own way, rather than using Dreamscarred Press' material.

But in other news, the lead designer likes Psionics Unleashed, so there's that :)

I'm looking for feats, traits...well that's about it, really, related to fighting with torches. I know the Dungeoneer's Handbook has a number of such things, and I plan on looking through it. But are there others? Third party material is fine (and encouraged, since I don't think there's much else 1pp stuff related).

My main goal is to make a torch and longsword fighter-type. He's been cursed / blessed by Destiny to fulfill some quest he barely knows of (that's the GM's decision), and has a chaotic firespirit that won't leave him alone. Hence the desire for a torch.

Base classes will be some levels of TPK Games' Malefactor, and most likely the rest in Slayer that's coming out in the playtest. So I'm just trying to get the groundwork done before that document hits.

If you've played GW2, I'm aiming for things like the torch offhand used there.

I'm looking for alchemist archetypes to retrain to with my alchemist. Right now, I have the Abandoned Arts books on alchemists, the Advanced Options: Alchemist's Discoveries from RGG/SGG, and I think one more that is slipping my mind right now.

Does anyone know of others? If it's related to experimentation on life / creation of life, all the better. Otherwise, I might homebrew my own.

Thunder Call (Su): At 3rd level, the thundercaller can use her performance to unleash a deafening peal of thunder. This allows the thundercaller to spend a round of performance to create an effect similar to the spell sound burst (having the same range and area and allowing the same saving throw). At 7th level, the sonic damage that is dealt by this blast of sound increases to 3d8. This damage further increases to 5d8 at 11th level, 7d8 at 15th level, and 9d8 at 19th level.

This performance replaces inspire competence.

Here's the first half of bardic performance.

Quote:

Bardic Performance: A bard is trained to use the Perform skill to create magical effects on those around him, including himself if desired. He can use this ability for a number of rounds per day equal to 4 + his Charisma modifier. At each level after 1st a bard can use bardic performance for 2 additional rounds per day. Each round, the bard can produce any one of the types of bardic performance that he has mastered, as indicated by his level.

Starting a bardic performance is a standard action, but it can be maintained each round as a free action. Changing a bardic performance from one effect to another requires the bard to stop the previous performance and start a new one as a standard action. A bardic performance cannot be disrupted, but it ends immediately if the bard is killed, paralyzed, stunned, knocked unconscious, or otherwise prevented from taking a free action to maintain it each round. A bard cannot have more than one bardic performance in effect at one time.

At 7th level, a bard can start a bardic performance as a move action instead of a standard action. At 13th level, a bard can start a bardic performance as a swift action.

Specific Question: Can the Thundercaller activate Thundercall twice or even three times per round (at 7th and 13th level, respectively)?

General Question: Can the bard activate multiple performances a round if he ends one before starting the other? For example: At level 13, can the bard end the performance he was using between rounds, start Dirge of Doom as a swift action, cast a spell as a standard action, end Dirge of Doom as a free action, and then start Inspire Courage as a move action?

Please hit the FAQ button, as both of these questions pop up somewhat often.

And keep the vitriol to a dull roar. There are a thousand of other threads to get angry about this issue in.